Former President Donald Trump is expected to attend a hearing Thursday in the federal criminal case involving his handling of classified documents in Florida, where his attorneys will argue the case should be thrown out.
Trump is not required to be at the hearing in Fort Pierce, but his lawyers indicated he and his two co-defendants would attend in a court filing Monday, where they asked for extra time to respond to some other outstanding motions in the case.
“The reasons for this request are that (1) the Defendants and counsel need to travel to Fort Pierce prior to March 14 in order to participate in the hearing, which is time we would otherwise use to prepare the other reply submissions; (2) President Trump and counsel need to spend time preparing for the oral argument, which is time we would otherwise use to prepare the other reply submissions,” the filing said.
They also said that the former president and his attorneys are preparing for the March 25 start date of his New York criminal trial “and the need to simultaneously devote attention to that case and this matter has been necessitated in part” by the “strategic scheduling demands of the Special Counsel’s Office.”
A short time after their Monday filing, Trump’s attorneys filed a separate one in New York, seeking to have the trial there delayed until Trump’s presidential immunity claims are decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump’s Florida filing did not mention the request he was making in New York, but a response from special counsel Jack Smith’s office later Monday cited the document in a filing to the Trump-appointed judge who’s presiding over the Florida case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
Smith’s filing urged Cannon to deny Trump’s request for a delay, arguing it’s “mostly based on circumstances about which they have been aware” for a long period of time, including the New York trial date.
Cannon has said that Thursday’s hearing is expected to take all day.
Trump’s legal team and prosecutors from Smith’s office are expected to argue their positions on whether some or all of the charges against Trump should be thrown out because of the Presidential Records Act before the case goes to trial.
Smith has urged Cannon to reject Trump’s claims that his presidential records “can be transformed into ‘personal’ records” upon being removed from the White House.
The two sides will also discuss a second motion to dismiss the case on the theory that the main statute used against Trump is unconstitutionally vague as it applies to presidents.
Trump faces dozens of criminal charges in the case, including willful retention of national defense information, false statements and representations, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record and corruptly concealing a document. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
The case is currently scheduled to go to trial on May 20, but Cannon is expected to push back the trial date.
Trump, who did not attend a trial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him last year, has been appearing in court on a more frequent basis in recent months, even though he is often not required to.
He attended most of a trial in Carroll’s second defamation case against him earlier this year, and late last year attended several days of the monthslong civil fraud trial brought against him and his company by New York Attorney General Letitia James.